Dinner Drama Part 1: Unfinished Business

I vaguely remember an event that occurred around 7:30 every evening and involved eating at a leisurely pace and my husband and I speaking to each other and actually hearing all the words.

I’m not sure what happened to that meal. Lately, many of our dinners devolve into an exercise in frustration.

The reason: For the last several months, Sam has not eaten his dinner. More than a few bites, that is. And some nights, not a single forkful passes his lips.

A while back, I posted these before-and-after shots of my kids’ dinner plates. Those are looking pretty good compared to Sam’s recent dinner showings.

Like this one:

I served: Baked fish, brown rice & broccoli

Sam ate: One bite of fish and a lick of ketchup

Or this one:

I served: Homemade pizza & cantaloupe

Sam ate: The cantaloupe

I follow Ellyn Satter’s Division of Responsibility: That means I’m supposed to be in charge of what we eat and when we eat. My kids are in charge of whether they eat it and how much they eat.

But I’m also human. And a (slightly harried) working mom of two young kids. So some days, when Sam is clamoring for a banana 30 minutes before dinner and I have three pots going on the stove and the phone is ringing and Henry is whining that he can’t find his Lego policeman’s microscopic set of handcuffs, the Division of Responsibility goes out the window. And some nights, after spending 45 minutes preparing a pretty delicious and well-balanced meal only to have Sam push away his plate yet again, I feel utterly defeated by this 30-pound redhead.

Sure: This phase, too, shall probably pass. But in the meantime, I wanted to know if there’s anything I could do differently. And I wanted to hear an outside perspective. So I decided to consult with Dr. Dina Rose, a “food sociologist” who teaches parents how to instill healthy eating habits and consciously shape their children’s relationship with food. She writes a terrific blog called It’s Not About Nutrition.

Next week, I’ll let you know what she has to say about Sam’s dinner defiance, plus some surprising tips she had for getting both kids eating better.

Oh, and those Lego handcuffs? I accidentally vacuumed them up. Don’t tell Henry.

Reader Interactions

Comments

I feel for you and try to take the same approach! This is one of our biggest struggles. Lately, the girls have been doing great though, but it definitely goes in phases. We find if they come to the dinner table hungry, we have the most success. I know how hard it is NOT to give them snacks as their tummy’s are growling. A lot of times in order to get the dinner on the table as fast as possible, I try to do the prep work (chopping, measuring, etc) the night before. A little idealistic, but helps a lot of I can manage. Good luck and really curious to see what the specialist says! Love your blog by the way.

So true, Carol. Doing prep work beforehand would really help. Now that I’ve got meal planning down pretty well, I think advance prep will be my next goal. If I did that the night before, I could even make my husband help! Even more incentive! 🙂 Thanks for reading my blog!

I can really sympathize — I think most moms can! I write about these struggles pretty frequently on my own blog. There are a few things I’ve adopted with our youngest (who’s usually pretty dinner-averse) that help: 1) He CANNOT wait until dinner. Can’t. If I keep him “hungry” so he’ll eat, it just backfires into a meltdown. So I make sure there are always small items that are PART of the planned meal — like a fruit plate, some tiny bits of the cheese that’s going onto the pizza, or some whole-grain bread — that I can serve up to him in very small amounts while he waits. Then he gets his “second helping” (i.e., dinner) when we’re all ready to eat, and if he doesn’t eat much else, I’m not as frustrated. 2) We don’t do the Satter method, so now that he’s 2, the rule is one bite of each item before you leave the table. No more than that is required. If I give him choices – “are you going to try the sweet potatoes now, or the corn?” — he’s more receptive. And if I let him have direction over what actually goes on his plate — a choice between two different vegetables, two different fruits, etc. — he’ll do even better. There are no easy answers! Hang in there. Some kids just don’t do dinner well until they’re older.

Thanks for your thoughts! Yes, I totally agree that serving some of the dinner before really helps. I’ve always done this with the veggies–my kids can nibble on their vegetables while I’m making dinner. Sam had not been receptive to this until very recently. And now that he’s nearing three, he is definitely getting easier to reason with. Six to nine months ago, that was definitely not the case! And I also agree that there is a fine line between a toddler who is hungry enough for dinner and a toddler who is so hungry he’s melting down.

Hey Sally — Glad to see you are writing about this. I know following DOR can be tough when you don’t see your child making progress. I think temperment has a lot to do with it as well. Some kids respond well to encouragement while others take any comments about food as pressure. I have the feeling my youngest is going to be much easier with eating than my 4-year old. He also has a much bigger appetite!

Oh, I can’t wait for you next post. My 5 year old is a good eater, but my almost 3 year old is not. There have been nights where she has only eaten ketchup. It’s a nightly struggle and it’s getting worse and dealing with all of that plus a 6 month old baby has me losing my mind!

Oh, we’ve had many ketchup-only dinners around here too! I hope you will get some good ideas from my posts–talking with Dr. Rose was fascinating and has greatly added to what I know about this topic. One of the most important things is to keep your cool–if she sees she’s getting a rise from you, she has the power! Funny how these little tiny kids can have such effect on us.

Been there, done that. My son would mostly eat two meals a day and drive me nuts stubbornly refusing to eat dinner. I didn’t offer alternatives, or treats, just that if you were hungry, it’s still available. That went on until growth spurts hit and he woke up one morning telling me how hungry he was. I told him the routine is the same – dressed first then breakfast which upset him to no end. At breakfast we discussed how eating dinner would help to keep him from having a belly that hurts in the morning. The growth spurts did it, he ate because he was hungry. He didn’t always love what we had, but he learned to eat dinner anyway. It was more troubling that after my son got over all of his food eating dislikes his friends would come over and not eat because we never had anything they liked, like white bread. I liked the vegetarian ones though, they were more adaptable and liked hummus.

Thanks for the comment, Diana. It is my goal to have two kids who can go to friends’ houses and be perfectly happy with the food that is served there! Our rule is the same around here: no alternatives, everyone gets the same dinner. I’ll be writing about our dinner “rules” next week, along with what Dr. Rose had to say. And I know what you mean about the growth spurts–my six-year-old son has started eating mass quantities of food (he’s skinny as a rail) and it is a joy to watch him devour healthy food without complaint! (well, most of the time anyway…)

This is a tough call. We have twins and have thankfully not experienced this problem when they were toddlers. My son who is nine is not keen on vegetables, soups and stews. This is problematic as we eat a lot of these foods in our house.

[…] about the Battle of Naboo. There are meltdowns. And time-outs. When Sam went through his recent dinner strike, there were many, many nights when family dinner ended with me, my head resting in my hands, […]

[…] about the Battle of Naboo. There are meltdowns. And time-outs. When Sam went through his recent dinner strike, there were many, many nights when family dinner ended with me, my head resting in my hands, […]

[…] As a toddler, he boycotted dinner for days on end and refused foods we all knew he loved (read Dinner Drama). Asking for “just one bite” challenged his independence and immediately put him on the […]